Cloak, page 45
“I’m going to sit on it,” Flanders told him, pulling for a little more altitude. “Trade my landing gear for his blades. If I can get above him, they won’t even be able to shoot at me without taking out their own helo.”
“Do it,” Vaughn said. “But watch yourself.”
“Yes, sir,” Flanders murmured. The ship and HH-65 were dead ahead now, no more than a mile away. Another minute and he’d be in position on top of them.
He didn’t get that minute. He got maybe five seconds before the world suddenly exploded in sound and fury and chaos and wind.
And as his helo spun and tipped crazily toward the ocean two hundred feet below, he found himself fighting for his life.
“Flanders?” someone shouted in his ear. “Flanders!”
Flanders didn’t answer, his full attention on the battle to bring his bucking helo under control. He had nearly succeeded when a second hurricane blast again sent him spinning and sliding toward the water.
But this time, at least, he got a glimpse of the source of the attack. Even as he renewed his battle for stability, a jet fighter flashed past overhead, its backwash shaking the helo like a child’s rag doll.
“Flanders!”
“I’ve found your missing Harriers,” Flanders managed as the shoreline spun past dizzyingly in the distance. “I can’t get near the ship—the Harriers are trying to splash me.”
“Hang on, Flanders,” Vaughn said. “Three more minutes.”
“Yes, sir,” Flanders said between clenched teeth. He’d regained some measure of control now, or at least was flying more or less level. The shoreline was directly ahead, which meant he’d been turned completely around. Putting the HH-65 into a wide circle, he started back.
The other helo was still sitting on the ship’s stern three hundred yards away. Between it and him, just settling into hover mode like a pair of angry eagles guarding their nest, were the Harriers.
For a moment he stared at them in fascination and dread. He’d never seen Harriers in action except in movies, and had always subconsciously believed that half of what they could supposedly do was the result of cinematic special effects.
But this was real, and those planes were indeed hovering like seagulls riding an ocean wind. The blast from their engines churned the air beneath them into a swirl of heat haze, reducing Flanders’s view of the ship and helo behind them to a smudge of orange against a smudge of white and gray.
And while there might indeed be enough firepower on its way to start a war, for the moment the only force the United States had on the scene was him.
He took a deep breath. This was no longer merely futile. It was suicidal. But he was a military man, and he’d sworn a military oath. And this most definitely came under the category of enemies foreign or domestic. Visually picking out a slot beneath the Harriers, knowing full well they would never let him get anywhere near that close, he got a grip on his throttle.
Without warning, the plane on his right abruptly broke from formation, shifting from hover to full flight as it veered sharply off toward the north. “What the hell?” he muttered.
“What?” Belford demanded.
“One Harrier away,” Flanders said. “Heading—” he craned his neck “—northeast, looks like. Repeat: one Harrier heading northeast. Going like a scalded bat.”
“On its way to intercept the National Guard F-15s,” Vaughn said. “Guard Wing Commander, you copy that?”
“Yes, sir,” another voice put in. “Is it still below the clouds?”
“Yes, but it’s climbing,” Flanders said.
“Okay,” the commander’s voice came. “We’re on it.”
“What about the other one?” Belford asked.
The second Harrier was still holding position between him and the splotch of orange and gray. “It’s drawing a line in the sand,” he told the colonel.
“The helo?”
“Still on the ship,” Flanders said, peering ahead. “I can’t see what they’re doing. Best guess is that they’re transferring the weapon. Orders?”
“Hold position and wait for the cavalry. And let us know if the helo takes off.”
~
“Bandit helo sighted offshore near Coquille River,” Ground Control’s voice came through Captain Jack Galway’s helmet, the words filtered through the roar of the engines shoving his F-15 through the air at full thrust. “Be advised that a second HH-65 is also on the scene.”
Galway grimaced. Leave it to those Coast Guard weenies to make a tricky situation trickier. Now, instead of just splashing anything that moved that was orange, his National Guard task force would have to figure out which of the helos was the right target. “Acknowledged,” he said, looking down at the rippled mat of sunlit clouds below and trying to calculate the proper moment to drop his planes through them onto the deck. They were still a good three minutes away from the target zone, but with the enemy below the clouds and sitting so close to the ground that even their pulse-Doppler radar was iffy, they were effectively flying into the situation blind. Not a good position to be in.
There was a click as Ground Control patched in a new frequency. “—northeast, looks like,” an unfamiliar voice said nervously. “Repeat: one Harrier heading northeast. Going like a scalded bat.”
“On its way to intercept the National Guard F-15s,” the Pentagon general on the line—Vaughn—put in. “Guard Wing Commander, you copy that?”
“Yes, sir,” Galway said. “Is it still below the clouds?”
“Yes, but it’s climbing.”
“Okay,” Galway said. “We’re on it.”
He clicked back to group frequency. “All right, gentlemen, put ’em on the deck and get ready for company.” Without waiting for a response, he started down into the clouds.
“Picking up a spike,” one of the others said suddenly. “What the hell? Sir, incoming Harrier pilot has ejected. Repeat, pilot has punched out.”
“What?” Galway threw a glance at his own instruments as he dropped through the bottom of the cloud layer into clear air again. “Ground, can you confirm?”
“Confirmed,” Ground Control said, sounding as bewildered as Galway felt. “We have a visual from the North Bend airport. Pilot has ejected approximately four miles north of the Coos River. Bandit Harrier continuing on heading zero-thirty, presumably on heading hold system.”
Galway stared out his canopy, the underbelly of the cloud layer rolling past just over his head. Sudden engine trouble? Or did the bandit just not have the stomach for a fight with anything better equipped than a Coast Guard helo? Or was this a feint to draw off his group?
His radar beeped. “Got him,” he reported, peering at the blip that had appeared on his head-up display. “Bandit Harrier should be on your scopes.”
“Confirmed,” Ground Control acknowledged.
“We have visual,” Galway added. There it was, coming their direction and still climbing. No engine trouble that he could see. In fact, the damn thing was running full throttle. A second later it disappeared up into the cloud layer. “We’ve lost visual,” he said, switching his attention back to the radar. The Harrier was still burning along toward them on its original heading. “Instructions?”
“Oh, hell,” Belford said suddenly. “The thing’s heading straight for Portland.”
Galway’s stomach twisted. “You think they’re trying to splash it there?”
“What else?” Belford said. “General?”
Overhead, above the clouds, the runaway Harrier flashed past. “Instructions?” Galway repeated urgently.
“Take it down,” Vaughn ordered.
“You heard the man,” Ground Control confirmed.
“We’re on it,” Galway said, throwing the F-15 into a hard turn and kicking in his afterburners. If it was a feint, he thought blackly, it had worked like a charm. Someone else would now have to take care of the unfinished business on the coast. “Let’s go, gentlemen.”
~
“Guard group is veering off to splash northbound Harrier,” Belford said. “Secondary backup now six minutes from your position. Repeat: six minutes and counting.”
Terrific, Flanders thought blackly. “That’s going to be about five minutes too long,” he told the colonel bluntly. The ship was still being obscured by the Harrier’s belly jets, but in the water beneath the plane Flanders could see the ripple pattern that meant the helo had increased power to its blades. “Bandit helo is preparing to lift.”
“Can you stop it?” Belford asked.
“No, sir,” Flanders said, his heart thudding in his throat. Even as he spoke, the splotch of orange began to move. “Helo’s lifting now.”
“And you can’t get to it?”
It was probably just anger and frustration he was hearing in the colonel’s voice, Flanders knew. God knew there was enough of both to go around. But out here alone, the only man standing between terrorists and the people he’d taken an oath to protect, all he could hear was accusation. “No, sir,” he said. All enemies, foreign and domestic . . . “But I might be able to at least take out the Harrier. I doubt he’ll be expecting me to ram him.”
“Out of the question,” General Vaughn said firmly. “Stand down.”
Flanders took a deep breath. “Sir—”
“That’s an order, Lieutenant,” Vaughn said, his tone leaving no room for argument. “Get to shore and put down. Now.”
The other helo had settled into place behind and a little to the right of the Harrier during the argument, both of them facing Flanders.
And with a mixture of relief and regret he realized that even if he now deliberately disobeyed Vaughn’s order, it was too late to have even a chance of stopping them. “Yes, sir,” he sighed. Twisting the stick, he turned around toward shore.
And as the land came into view, something caught his eye. Two somethings, in fact, shooting up from low-level concealment behind the coastal ridges and blistering the air behind them as they headed his direction.
“There you go, Flanders,” General Vaughn said softly. “Surprise.”
“Hello, General Kalil,” a new voice snarled onto the frequency, a voice edged with bitterness and grim anticipation. “In case you’re monitoring this frequency—and of course you are—this is Marine Captain Daniel MacMillan Hamilton. Remember me?”
~
Hamilton was sitting in the Roseburg Airport hangar that was operating as makeshift headquarters for the Marine investigation unit, glowering at yet another set of negative reports, when the scramble call came in. The team had two fully armed Harriers on hand, standing by against the day when they found the stolen jets, and he was in the cockpit of one of them practically before the echo of the alert had faded away into the hills.
By all rights he shouldn’t have been there, of course. It wasn’t his plane, he wasn’t assigned to flight duty, and on top of that he was still under investigation for the loss of his own Harrier. But none of that mattered to him.
It didn’t matter to Major Johnson, either. He took one look at Hamilton’s expression and wordlessly pointed him to the fighter. The plane captain who’d preflighted the Harrier didn’t even bother to look at his face.
With one of the group’s other pilots, a Lieutenant Hofstetter, flying wingman beside him, he took off over the hills, heading for the coast at full throttle and not giving a tinker’s damn whether they rattled the civilians below or not. With no military aircraft supposedly closer than Portland, this little wild card ought to come as an unpleasant surprise to Kalil and his men.
Major Johnson and General Vaughn knew it, too. Johnson had phoned in word of the Roseburg response instead of acknowledging the scramble via radio; and Vaughn, the old fox, had likewise made sure it stayed off the air.
The flight across the Coast Ranges was like a simulation exercise nightmare, except that it was real, with no reset available if he screwed up. The tree-covered hills loomed up in front of them, grabbing at his plane as he hugged the ground as closely as possible, not wanting Kalil’s forward spotters to get even a glimpse of the incoming fighters until it was too late. He shot over small towns and smaller ranches, dodged between hills and through narrow river valleys, and more than once scraped the underside of his Harrier on the treetops. The early-morning Umpqua River Valley sunlight changed to fog, then to low clouds, a brief clearing, and then to low clouds again.
Almost before he expected it, he topped the last ridge and saw the Pacific Ocean stretching away before him. There, dead ahead, was the standoff between the Coast Guard HH-65 and the Harrier. His Harrier.
Smiling tightly, he flipped his radio switch. “Hello, General Kalil,” he said. “In case you’re monitoring this frequency—and of course you are—this is Marine Captain Daniel MacMillan Hamilton. Remember me?
“You have my plane. I want it back.”
~
It was as unexpected a development as Flanders could have looked for, on a morning that had already seen far too many surprises crammed into the same shopping bag. Where this particular pair of fighters had come from, how Hamilton had come out of nowhere back onto the scene, and what had happened to Belford’s damn six-minute-and-counting timetable he couldn’t begin to guess. All he knew, or cared about, was that the incoming planes were a welcome addition to the game plan.
It was quickly evident that his surprise at Hamilton’s appearance was shared by the pilot of the stolen Harrier. Flanders was able to swing his helo completely back around before the other even reacted, and when he did it was to shift abruptly from hover to full forward flight. With its vertical thrust platform knocked out from under it, the plane plunged toward the ocean for a few heartbeats before it built up sufficient forward momentum to regain adequate lift. Rising sharply, tracing out a half loop beneath Flanders’s helo, it arced forward and upward to meet the oncoming attackers. The bandit helo’s pilot, perhaps a bit faster on the uptake, was also in motion, buzzing past above Flanders’s head and coming up behind the Harrier as it rose back to altitude, crowding in as close as he could without getting caught in the turbulence.
And as the two aircraft blurred over and under Flanders, clearing the area in front of him, he saw something he hadn’t noticed until that moment.
The ship below was on the move.
“The ship’s rabbiting,” he reported, swinging his helo into pursuit. “Heading northwest at high speed.”
“Northwest?” Belford asked. “Out to sea?”
“Yes, sir,” Flanders confirmed, frowning. The ship was still picking up speed. A lot of speed. “It’s pulling fifty knots and still accelerating. What kind of ship is this, anyway?”
“A disguised racing cat,” Vaughn said. “Can you stay with it?”
“I can try,” Flanders said, swinging in behind it and gunning his engine.
“Backup’s on the way,” Vaughn said. “Maintain visual as long as you can, but try to stay out of attack range.”
“Yes, sir,” Flanders said, putting the helo’s nose down and giving it full throttle. There was no way they were going to get away from him. Not now. No way in hell.
~
The plan had been for Three to parachute from his Harrier as close to U.S. 101 as possible; and as Nine sped north along the highway he could see through his windshield that Three was following that plan to the letter.
So much so, in fact, that traffic was starting to snarl as the southbound line of morning commuters became aware of the parachute dropping from the sky and slowed to watch. Keeping one eye on his comrade and the other on the erratic traffic flow, Nine headed for the extrapolated drop point, wondering which of them would get there first.
Three won, but not by much. He was in the process of collapsing his chute when Nine did a quick and slightly reckless U-turn and pulled off the highway beside him. “You all right?” he asked, hitting the emergency flashers and hopping out to help.
“No problems,” Three said, looking warily at the traffic driving slowly past them, the drivers rubbernecking for all they were worth. “You look a mess.”
Nine looked down at the mud coating his coat and trousers. “I had to backstop the general from under the van,” he explained. “I’ll dump the coat before we get moving.”
“Did everything work?”
“Our end did,” Nine said as he started folding the far end of the chute. “So did yours, apparently.”
“So far,” Three said, looking warily at the passing traffic. “You realize that half these people are probably calling the authorities. We’ll need to grab a new car.”
“Don’t worry,” Nine assured him as he carried the folded chute toward the rear of his car. “The general has that covered. Come and see.”
Three did so; and as he rounded the rear of the car his lip twitched in a wry smile. “Ah,” he said. “Clever.”
“Isn’t it?” Nine agreed, gazing at the boldly hand-lettered SKYDIVER CHASE TEAM sign fastened to the back of the car as he fished out the trunk key. “You’ll notice how it’s accidentally slipped down just enough to obscure part of the license plate. We’ll have plenty of time to get that new car.”
They stuffed the chute into the trunk. Nine unfastened the sign and tossed it in on top of the mass of nylon, then pulled off his muddy coat and added it to the pile. They closed the trunk and got into the car, and as Nine waited for an opening in the traffic flow, Three ducked down and slipped on the bright red coat and blond woman’s wig that had been waiting for him. A minute later, looking for all the world like a respectable couple heading in to work, they were driving sedately back toward town.
They were nearly to the bridge when they had to pull off onto the shoulder as four police cars blew past heading north, lights and sirens bellowing their determination.
Irreverently, Nine wondered how loudly they would bellow when they found their quarry gone.
~
The bandit Harrier dropped close to the ocean as if planning a suicide ditch; then, roaring back to power and altitude, it charged fangs-out toward the kill.
